ing Street called Tom Kell}) the Prime Minister's spokesman, to tell him about the "Today" sto Campbell, who was standing next to Kelly when the call came, divides stories he doesn't like into hr . " b 11 ks "" 1 t ee categorIes: 0 oc , comp ete bollocks," and "bollocks on stilts." His first reaction was that nobody would take this one seriously, but by the time he reached Basra he realized that he had miscalculated. The travelling press corps was less interested in reporting on Blair's speech than in pursuing Gilligan's alle- gation that the government had "sexed up" the September dossier. Back in Lon- don, the early editions of the Evening Standard featured the headline "BLAIR FUES INTO GROWING ROW OVER REA- SON FOR WAR." From Iraq, the British party travelled to Poland, for a meeting with Leszek Miller, the Polish prime minister. At a press conference, Blair, visibly angry; in- sisted, "The idea that we authorized or made our intelligence agencies invent some piece of evidence is completely ab- surd." Gilligan's story had already been picked up around the world, partly be- cause of its distribution on the BBC World Service. After leaving Poland, Blair went on to St. Petersburg, to attend the city's three-hundredth-anniversary cele- brations. There J oschka Fischer, the Ger- man foreign minister, attacked him, saying that if no Iraqi W.M.D. were found Blair should "admit he has misused intelligence reports and misled world opinion." On Sunda})June 1st, there was still no sign of the story's dying down. "WHEN SPIES MEET SPIN" was the headline in the Q ,L" " d vserver. IlEANOTI-IERDAY, trumpete the Sunday Times. The Mail on Sunday, one of Campbell's least favorite newspa- pers, contained two articles guaranteed to give him a headache: an opinion poll showing that two-thirds of the British public believed that Blair had misled them on Iraqi W.M.D., and a full-page piece by none other than Andrew Gilli- gan, which, for the first time, identified the person who had ordered the dossier to be "sexed up." The headline read, "I asked my intelligence source why Blair misled us all over Saddam's weapons. His reply? One word. . . CAMPBELL." Later that day, Campbell confided to his diary; "It is grim for me, and it is grim forTB. And there is this huge stuff about trust." On Tuesda}) June 3rd, he 98 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 8, 2003 AI R5CAPES The sky in flood Marshalled on by pressure, over the many-angled windows of property far below. The air has states, not places. On the outer of Earth, the sky above darkens to blue matter Lower than where Space streaks In, risen scents and particles plateau, diffusing to go worldwide. The chill slates of that year which, blown out of Iceland volcanoes, famined up the French Revolution hung and globed out on those levels. Cloud wisps are an instructor chalking to proof! And here it's true: everyone has to have to. These plunge lands being water dusts that take color from the Sun: gold cobble, diaphanous frolic, optical liqueur. A Thailand of cloud-dance, cobalt gold-cracked cyclone Rumba wrote Blair a lengthy memo, advising him on how to respond at his weekly Prime Minister's Qyestion Time. "The current frenzy flows from the fact that apart from the 2 mobile labs nothing new has been found," Campbell noted. "Ev- erything stems from that, so tomorrow is in part about saying as much as you can about the process towards discovery- who is involved, what sort of numbers, where are they searching, who are they interviewing, how are we verifYing." At this stage, nobody in the govern- ment knew that Gilligan's source was David Kell Gilligan had reported that his information came from an official in charge of drawing up the dossier, which pointed to a very senior person. Camp- bell spoke to John Scarlett, who insisted that reports about unhappiness within the intelligence agencies weren't coming from the top. Campbell accepted Scar- lett's assurances, but others in Blair's cir- cle were not so sure. John Reid, who was then the leader of the House of Com- d th " 1 " mons, suggeste at rogue e ements in the security services might be trying to undermine the government. T he BBC--or the Beeb, as it is often referred to-was founded in 1922 by a group of radio manufacturers, and has since developed into the world's lead- ing public-service media compan}) em- ploying around twenty-five thousand people and providing news and enter- tainment through four mediums: televi- sion, radio, the Internet, and print. It is an independent organization, but it oper- ates under a state charter and is financed by a mandatory license fee. When Mar- garet Thatcher and the Tories were in